Hand held communication devices, such as mobile telephones and PDAs, currently are adapted to incorporate a variety of functions and to support multiple mechanisms of communication. For example, a mobile phone can provide traditional wireless telephone functions, while also providing the ability for a user to capture digital images and the ability to transmit or receive captured images for display on the phone's LCD. Indeed, the modern mobile phone allows the user to send and receive text messages, audio and video clips, graphics and images via electronic mail, Short Message Service (SMS), or Multimedia Message Service (MMS), in addition to simply talking to another caller.
Each communication mechanism is associated with a particular addressing scheme, such as a phone number for phone calls, an email address for electronic messages, or an http URL for posting images. The personal communication devices that support a wide range of communication mechanisms generally treat each mechanism separately.
One primary limitation of conventional communication devices, such as camera phones, is that the devices lack the ability to allow the user to capture an image while the device is in communications mode, i.e., during a telephone call. For example, assume the user of the camera phone is having a telephone conversation with a friend and sees an object or scene nearby that the user thinks the friend may find of interest. With a conventional communication device, the user would be unable to snap a photo of the object or scene and send it to the friend contemporaneously with the telephone conversation.
Instead, today's communication device requires the user to implement two separate data exchange mechanisms, e.g., phone communication and electronic mail, and also require the user to know the caller's address scheme, e.g., phone number and email address, associated with each mechanism. In order to send a captured data to a phone call participant today, the user of the communication device would have to terminate the call, capture the image, setup the device to send an email message with the image as an attachment, provide or look-up the recipient's email address from the device's address book, transmit the email message, and then reestablish the telephone call with the recipient. Accordingly, while current communication devices support multiple communication mechanisms and integrate camera functionality, they require a significant amount of user interaction to utilize these mechanisms, which is cumbersome and inefficient.
Accordingly, a need exists for a method and apparatus that allows a user of a mobile communication device to capture an image during a phone conversation and to send the image to the phone call participant(s) with minimal user interaction. The present invention addresses such a need.